Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
[Though computer science is a fairly new discipline, it is predominantly based on the Cartesian world view. As Edsgar W. Dijkstra has pointed out] A scientific discipline emerges with the - usually rather slow! - discovery of which aspects can be meaningfully 'studied' in isolation for the sake of their own consistency.
